How should lawyers be paid? asks Geoffrey Bindman
Lord Justice Jackson’s review of the rules and principles governing the costs of civil litigation raises, as he says at the beginning of his preliminary report, issues “stretching far beyond the costs rules”.
There are issues about what work lawyers do and should do in civil disputes, and what they should be paid for that work.
Keeping the subject within manageable bounds is clearly going to be a problem for him. His preliminary report alone runs to 663 pages.
This can be no surprise to any lawyer who has grown up with what used to be known confusingly as taxation, which of course has nothing to do with taxation as understood elsewhere. It simply denotes the judicial assessment of fees. I do not recall that it formed part of any examination syllabus (which, if it had, I would surely have failed).
It was—to the new entrant to the profession at any rate—a morass: a
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